ISO Certified and What it Means for the Chicago Mat Company

Jim Buik - Friday, August 15, 2014

Many organizations, the uniform rental company included, tout that they are ISO certified and then it floats in the ether, nary an explanation, until now. The ISO story starts in 1946 when delegates from over 25 countries met to create an international organization to "facilitate the international coordination and unification of industrial standards."

You may think that standards do not affect your daily life, but in fact, they are super important in ensuring that things work for everyone, everywhere. The ISO standards the uniform company uses help make our facility and organization run more efficiently, directly impacting the type of service and products you receive as a customer.

The Chicago mat company is ISO 9001:2008 certified, among one of many different types of standards possible across all industry sectors. The ISO 9000 family addresses various aspects of quality management and contains some of ISO’s best known standards. It is implemented by over one million companies and organizations in over 170 countries.

The Eight Quality Management Principles Guiding the Uniform Rental Company

There are eight principles that guide this standard including: customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, system approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to decision making, and mutually beneficial supplier relationships. Applying these principles leads to a number of great benefits for an organization:

Improved customer loyalty and satisfaction

Team member motivation, participation and commitment

Unified and clear goals across the organization

Improved, consistent and predictable results

Flexibility to react quickly to opportunities and resolve problems

Easily accessible data and records

Optimization of costs and resources

Increased revenue and market share

…to name a few. The overarching benefit is consistency across all levels of the organization so the customer receives the same superior quality of product and service no matter what.

The Uniform Company Conducts Internal Audits of its Processes and Systems

To ensure that these principles are being sufficiently applied there are required external and internal audits. The uniform rental company is currently in the midst of an internal audit (one of two per year) performed by Team Leaders and President/Owner Jim Buik. The leadership team, with a lot of gusto, audit different operating areas, like the routes, wash floor and mat rolling, in two, four hour shifts. They perform the duties, using job aids that document each one of our processes, and strive to find areas of improvement. It is then discussed with the team and the opportunities for improvements are recommended.

Contact Roscoe to Learn More About the Certification Process

These audits have helped the mat rental company find a plethora of opportunities throughout the years and has continued to move the company forward. Find out if your company can benefit from such a certification. Contact a Roscoe representative to find out more about our processes or leave a Yelp review if you are particularly impressed with the standards we have enacted.